Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Awwww... Predator behavior.

Some might be upset that mom and dad left their kid to clearly be a lure for such a shot. I submit, though, that if we stipulate that thick safety glass is beyond an African lion's ability to defeat (and so far that's been the case), the kid is far safer here than being dressed up for a child beauty pageant, or sent to cheer-leading camp, or stood near a mountain stream for a nature shot. It's all the same. "Look at my kid!"

The zoo in St. Paul's Como Park has a great tiger exhibit. The cats are confined behind extremely tall chain-link fences, which arc far out over the enclosure to keep them from climbing up and out. The area is usually filled with families.

I once saw a toddler that had obviously JUST learned to walk and run going past enclosure. One of the tigers was lying on the grass, casually watching. As the boy saw his mother he broke into a run, and promptly went flat on his face from overbalancing.

In almost the same millisecond that tiger transformed from a large, lazy sprawling pile of fur into an apex predator. In two enormous bounds and a leap, he was on the chain-link fence directly above the child, all four paws embedded in the fence. It was an amazing display of pure reflexes, since the tiger obviously startled himself by it.

The kid never even noticed it, since his back was to the enclosure, but his mother shrieked and sprinted the distance between them...fast, but nowhere near as fast as that cat. She scooped him up and cuddled him while running away from that cage just as fast as she could.

Heh, heh. Peter Capstick has a description of a similar event in one of his books, except the cat got a paw through the bars and the parents started screaming. Apparently the cat was new to the zoo and hadn't learned about bars yet.

I bet these parents are related to the ones who had their kid feed marshmallows to the Yellowstone bears so they could get a "cute picture." The ranger arrested them and the bear was not all that hungry, thanks be.